


A Hero's Heart

by TheColorBlue



Series: But the World is So Much Grander [3]
Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-03-15
Packaged: 2017-11-02 00:05:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers was an artist, so they put him on making training films for the war effort. In Hollywood, the military had taken over the Disney backlot. In New York, they commandeered the remaining staff of Marvelous Inkwells Studio. </p><p>(Somewhat AU from the film canon, but only in the attempt to write a more naturalistic story for Steve Rogers).</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hero's Heart

Steve Rogers was an artist, so they put him on making training films for the war effort. In Hollywood, the military had taken over the Disney backlot. In New York, they commandeered the remaining staff of Marvelous Inkwells Studio. At the time, Steve had been washing the paint off acetate cells to help pay for his fine arts classes. When the draft came, it took a third of the staff with it. The second third enlisted voluntarily. The last third included an asthmatic who had, nonetheless, tried to enlist anyway. When the medical examination was over, and they had all but gently booted him out the door, he thought: he didn’t know why he had even bothered, although there was also a part of him that did. 

He knew that, on the front, he would have been a danger, not just to himself, but also to the men he fought alongside. Yet when he watched the newsreels, he yearned to be there. It was just that crazy feeling. It wasn’t for glory or adventure, it was simply that feeling in his heart. He knew where he was supposed to be, and it wasn’t here, flashing his identification each day at the door so that he could go in and work on drawings for training films. 

Little things helped. When his unit had meetings with the military training experts, they said, those men who watched the training film rather than using written material passed with a rating 20% higher than those who didn’t. Your work is invaluable to the war effort, and don’t you forget it. 

When Steve went out for drinks with Bucky, the night before his best pal was shipped out, Bucky said with a laugh, clapping one hand to Steve’s shoulder with the other arm around the waist of a pretty girl, “Well at least you’re not collecting scrap metal and bacon fat for bombs, right?”

Which earned Bucky a snipe from the pretty girl. She was going to work for one of those ammunition factories, and she’d like to see him on the field without a weapon produced back home. 

Steve rolled his empty shot glass between his fingers, and said, “I don’t know. I mean, I know this stuff is important, but also I just don’t know.”

“Hey,” Bucky said. “I could be watching one of your films not too long from now, right? Teach me something about Stark’s new tank designs, or how to avoid getting popped in the head by a Nazi. You’ll be watching my back that way, even if you aren’t, you know, literally watching my back.”

Steve smiled, long and wry, and Bucky ordered another drink for himself, his friend, and the lovely lady clasping his uniformed arm. 

He and Bucky had been roommates, Steve working odd jobs in a cartoon studio and taking evening art classes, while Bucky worked in a canning factory, saving up so that he could take college classes. They were family. They had looked after each other through school and the Great Depression, and Steve sat in the one room flat and thought about how Bucky was going overseas, and Steve was not. Steve was frail and got sick easily. He knew how to take care of himself, and he knew the limits of his own body. Bucky complained loudly if he got so much as a head cold. They were different in a lot of ways, but Steve wished that he could be where the men were laying their lives down for their country, he wished he could be that kind of man. 

\--

By chance, he struck up a conversation with a Dr. Abraham Erskine during his lunch break from working on training films. The good doctor and a certain Howard Stark had been in the building to review one of the more classified films being produced downstairs. Steve didn’t know it at the time, but the film was going to be propaganda about a theoretical new super soldier project being developed. 

All Steve knew was that he was out on the roof, eating a ham sandwich while some soldiers on guard duty were cracking dirty jokes on the other side, loose and at ease, and when a Dr. Erskine came out for fresh air, asking this skinny kid if he’d mind the company, Steve said no, of course not, sit down. 

They got to talking about the war. They got to talking about the fact that Steve had a purpling black eye.

“A kid like you doesn’t look as though he could be taking so many hits to the face,” Dr. Erskine observed genially. “You should be taking better care of yourself.”

“It’s not just about that,” Steve insisted.

“Oh?”

“Sometimes, you just gotta stand up for yourself and others, you know?” Steve said, all seriousness and sincerity. He waved half a sandwich around a bit while he talked. “I’m not talking about looking down on the little guy because you have some idea of how he can’t defend himself—heck, I _am_ the little guy. And I’m not talking about beating someone else silly, or being out to kill anyone. It’s more like, standing up because you want to be something bigger than simply yourself. Aspiring for that. Honoring the idea that men aren’t just men, they can also be good, the ideal of it. And then, of course, be willing to take the lumps for it, because you’re not just swaggering around, talking about things, but you’re willing to take the world and live in it. 

Dr. Erskine looked at Steve speculatively. Then he asked him, quite casually, if this young man would be interested in testing for something experimental they were doing lately— “The Colonel has been looking at enlisted soldiers but, ah, I wonder if it would be worth our while to look to other sorts of men as well.”

\--

Being Captain America was a bit like Steve might have dreamed, and also nothing like it. 

There was still that feeling in his heart though, the one that told him where he was meant to be, and what he was to be. He knew where he was meant to be, and he was going to give it all that he had. His life had always been a little bit about that, you know?

In the new millennium, Steve Rogers had a feeling like his compatriots may have viewed him as a little slow just because he was born over seventy years ago. He doesn’t get that. He doesn’t get how growing up during the Great Depression and working for yourself because you have no living family by blood, or surviving as the kid of immigrants in the streets of Brooklyn—he didn’t get how that was supposed to make him somehow slower than everyone else. 

When they showed him computers, when they had showed him the StarkPad, he had taken the idea and thought about it, and then he’d laughed, and Tony Stark had squinted at him like he wasn’t sure what was going on. 

See, because Steve loved to read, seeing as it was one of the few hobbies available to him as a kid. And there was a story he‘d read, not so long ago (or not so long ago in his mind): “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster. You didn’t get to be spending time with Howard Stark without wondering a bit about the future. He’d read science fiction, and maybe it hadn’t all been quite like this, all shining surfaces and enamel-colors and things moving so fast and in ways the human eye could never see, and he didn’t know if he’d like this new world or hate it with that fierce longing for a life he’d lost--but he wasn’t slow, his mind had never been slow. And he looked back at Tony Stark, at this irreverent, arrogant, childish person who was Howard’s kid, and he thought, whatever happens now, I’ll be the man I was meant to be, and you’ll do the same, and we’ll be even-matched: I know it.


End file.
